What’s New
North Carolina’s public-university system is suspending all general-education and major-specific course requirements related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, citing a Trump administration executive order.
That’s according to a memo obtained by The Chronicle and first reported by Asheville Watchdog, a North Carolina news outlet.
The Details
In the February 5 memo, Andrew Tripp, the system’s general counsel, told the 16 university chancellors why those curricular requirements may run afoul of “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” signed last month by President Trump, which could in turn threaten the mammoth amount of federal research funding that their institutions receive.
Among other things, Trump’s order mandates that an institution that wants to contract with the federal government “will be required to agree, as a condition of the contract, that ‘it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws,’” Tripp wrote, quoting the order. All contracting entities must be certified as in compliance, he wrote.
Should an institution continue to maintain programs “deemed noncompliant,” they “risk ineligibility for additional federal contracts and grants — or worse — costly enforcement actions,” Tripp wrote.
That presents problems for curricular and program requirements “on prohibited topics discussed” in the order, according to Tripp. For example, their existence “may prevent the very certification now required of federal contractors.” Even if certification is made “in good faith,” these requirements “might still be deemed noncompliant by a federal agency and trigger the consequences described” in the order, Tripp wrote.
Earlier in the memo, Tripp wrote that universities within the system received around $1.4 billion in federal research dollars in the 2023-24 fiscal year, as well as more than $600 million in federal student aid and other funding. Even though some additional guidance is expected and “the law in this area remains unsettled,” Tripp wrote, “the risk of jeopardizing over $1.4 billion in critical federal research funding is simply too great to defer action.”
He told chancellors that they may approve “a tailored waiver” for individual major-specific requirements but not for any general-education requirement.
A spokesperson for the university system said in an email that, “like institutions across the country, we’re assessing recent changes to federal policy and ensuring our universities can continue receiving the federal funding they depend on.” Course content is not affected, he wrote. Rather, the memo “suspends any requirements for DEI-focused courses as a condition of graduation.”
It’s not immediately clear how prevalent those requirements are across the system.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has a “Diversity and Equity"-related general-education requirement, along with one targeted toward “Global Engagement and Intercultural Learning.” Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill must take a course that fulfills its “Power, Difference, and Inequality” requirement, as well as a “Global Understanding and Engagement” requirement.
The Backdrop
The move by the UNC system is more evidence of how hectic the past three weeks have been, as colleges scramble to discern whether they are out of compliance with a flurry of presidential declarations and policy revocations. Some experts have predicted that, in light of such activity, colleges may preemptively roll back DEI efforts on their campuses.
Well before Trump’s executive order and the UNC system’s response to it, diversity-course requirements had come under scrutiny. In 2023, the Goldwater Institute promoted the Freedom From Indoctrination Act — model legislation that among other things would prevent public colleges from requiring students to enroll in a DEI or critical-race-theory-related course to satisfy any general-education or major or minor requirement, though programs primarily focused on racial, ethnic, or gender studies could be exempted.
That year, Florida’s legislature passed a law barring “general education core courses” that “distort significant historical events” or teach “identity politics.” It also says that general-education courses should not be based on “unproven, speculative, or exploratory content.”
In response, Florida’s public colleges and universities extensively reviewed their course offerings and ultimately winnowed down their lists by the hundreds, The Chronicle previously reported. (Many courses were removed from gen ed because they had not been offered in years, or for data clean-up reasons.) In contrast to the UNC system’s reaction to Trump’s executive order, Florida’s efforts to comply with a state law took months and involved faculty members on the various campuses.
In an interview, Jay M. Smith, a history professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and president of the North Carolina conference of the American Association of University Professors, said the requirement suspensions are “chilling,” “surreal,” “deeply offensive,” and “Orwellian.”
At his institution, the general-education curriculum, which was revised “at considerable cost of time and energy just a few years ago,” reflects faculty consensus about what undergraduates need to study in order to be “effective, functioning citizens of the world,” Smith said. To see the university system “move to pre-empt any possible challenges” to those choices is “very depressing and demoralizing,” he said.
What to Watch For
It’s possible that other universities, in light of the Trump executive order, could examine their DEI-related general-education requirements and conclude something similar. Said requirements are not rare, according to a 2024 report from the organization Speech First, which co-wrote the model legislation restricting diversity-course requirements. Of the 248 colleges it examined, 165 of them require students to take “a DEI-related class to graduate.”
Of those 165 institutions, more than half are public.
Three states have proposed legislation this year to bar some or all public colleges from requiring courses that promote certain concepts, such as systemic racism and racial and gender diversity. The bill in Texas would go the furthest, restricting institutions from offering any programs or courses in LGBTQ or DEI studies.
